book excerpts

In The Way of the Happy Woman, Sara Avant Stover shows how simple, natural, and refreshingly accessible practices can minimize stress and put us back in sync with our own cycles and those of nature. Here she offers insights into how we can make the most of the spring season.

In honor of the spring equinox, New World Library is offering a 50% discount on all titles, with free shipping in the continental U.S. for orders of $35.00 or more. Simply enter the code SPRING at checkout. Offer good through Tuesday, March 31, 2015.(READ MORE)

We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book, and we’d love to hear from you — what project has been in a holding pattern in your life, and how did you take the procrastination monster by the horns to see a project through to completion?

The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work is based on a documentary of the same name about Joseph Campbell’s life. Editor Phil Cousineau rescued hours of outtakes from film vaults and organized it into the book, which is now available in a new paperback edition. In what amounts to Campbell’s only spiritual autobiography, this beautifully crafted collection of conversations and interviews reveals and illuminates Campbell’s personal and intellectual journey.

Behind the man who devoted himself to exploring the mythologies of the world was someone whose life was a deep personal quest for his own immortal hero. The Hero’s Journey follows the footsteps of Joseph Campbell as he tells stories of his life, his love, and his passion.

We hope you’ll enjoy this short excerpt from Phil Cousineau’s introduction to the book.(READ MORE)

We asked New World Library’s associate publisher, Munro Magruder, to share why he is so passionate about the book. He said, “The thing that impressed me the most about this remarkable book was Jacques Lusseyran’s ability to access and describe the inner senses after he was blinded in a freak accident at the age of eight. His description of sound sets the tone for ten of the most amazing and powerful pages in this book.”

Slowly it becomes clear that one of the greatest of all superstitions is the separation of the mind from the body. This does not mean that we are being forced to admit that we are only bodies; it means that we are forming an altogether new idea of the body. For the body considered as separate from the mind is one thing—an animated corpse. But the body considered as inseparable from the mind is another, and as yet we have no proper word for a reality which is simultaneously mental and physical. To call it mental-physical will not do at all, for this is the very unsatisfactory joining of two concepts which have both been impoverished by long separation and opposition. But we are at least within sight of being able to discard altogether ideas of a stuff which is mental and a stuff which is material. “Stuff” is a word which describes the formless mush that we perceive when sense is not keen enough to make out its pattern. The notion of material or mental stuff is based on the false analogy that trees are made of wood, mountains of stone, and minds of spirit in the same way that pots are made of clay. “Inert” matter seems to require an external and intelligent energy to give it form. But now we know that matter is not inert. Whether it is organic or inorganic, we are learning to see matter as patterns of energy—not of energy as if energy were a stuff, but as energetic pattern, moving order, active intelligence.(READ MORE)

Birds are passing overhead. They are like stars in motion, music in the sky. As always, they remind me of Nikki.
Nikki was a friend of mine, and very dear to my heart. She had cerebral palsy, and to all the world she looked like one of God’s cruel jokes. She could not walk unaided. Her legs were useless sticks; her arms, helpless bird wings. When she talked her head lolled and spittle dripped down her chin. Her voice was a grating and unintelligible bray.
More than once I saw parents in supermarkets turn their children away when they saw her coming. She was a reminder of their darkest fears about life gone terribly and irretrievably wrong.
I used to love to talk to Nikki — not out of some twisted motive of self-congratulation, or because she was a dark mirror of my own good fortune, but because she was so full of life. She had a mischievous twinkle in her eye and a reservoir of joy that was deeper than anything I could imagine.